Posts Tagged ‘Niner’

When I was searching for a new 29er frame, this was right up there at the top of my shortlist….until I saw the price. It is such a nice bike but the cost puts it out of the reach of ordinary mortals….unless you are a banker that is.
I guess we won’t see too many of these out on the trails.

I think I have put enough miles into these bikes now to be able to review them objectively.

By way of introduction then, I first dipped my toe into the 29er waters with the Singular Swift and recently moved onto the Niner Sir9. Ostensibly the same type of product – steel hardtails – they are as alike as chalk and cheese. Although by no way ‘cheap’ the Singular Swift is the budget bike of the two, costing a mere £440.00 for frame and fork delivered. The Niner was getting on for twice the price frame only and to be honest, was a bit of an indulgence.

Anyone following this blog will have read about my struggles with the Swift, how I tried time after time to make it work for me and how, time after time, I failed. On reflection, the reason for this failure was down to my trying to make a 29er work as a 26 inch bike, with riser bars, too long a stem etc etc. Despite being advised by Kurt (29ermeister) to the contrary, I persisted with my attempts to make round components fit into square holes until I gave up, took his advice on board and found the hinterland of 29er joy lying spread out before me. When I got to build up the Niner, this knowledge was already in the data banks so the same struggle was avoided. This, and only this, is the reason why the preceding pages have not been filled with lamentation about the Niner not working well!

I like both of these bikes a lot, and would be hard pressed if made to choose between one or the other. The 29er format really works well for me, all I am annoyed about is that no one made me buy one years ago!

Shared characteristics – both bikes eat rough ground, they climb well (very well) they sprint well, they are real mile munchers and make riding long distances at a decent sustained pace relatively easy. The 1×9 format is ideal for all of these disciplines but I find it really hard to get either bike up to speed quite as quickly as riders on 26 inch wheel bikes particularly in short course races. The time lag is minimal but makes the difference between hanging onto the bunch and losing them. As I do not excel at this format of race anyway, I can live with it. I am not sure whether running a 2×9 (and a pair of younger legs) would sort this deficiency out but I suspect it might.

So what are the differences between them? I will go through all the technical gubbins later but, as you will see from the build details, I have tried to keep them as similar as possible, with the exception of the forks…the Swift is rigid whereas the Niner is a hardtail.

As soon as you throw your leg over the saddle you can feel just how different these bikes are. Even on the road their basic characteristics shine through. The best way I can think of describing the ‘feel’ is to draw an analogy between the bikes and cars. The Swift immediately makes you think of a stripped down, purposeful race machine, a little like a full on rally car, short on frills but workmanlike and built with a purpose in mind….going fast. The Niner feels soft, like the top of the range road going equivalent of said rally car. It just gives you the impression that it will float over anything you put in its way whereas the Swift might ping off it. The paradox is that stiff as it may be, the Swift does not beat you up and it holds a line remarkably well and, while the Niner feels more refined, it does not really go any slower. So, what else marks them apart?

The big one for me is the way they deal with singletrack; I appreciate this may a function of the different types of fork, I have had neither the time nor the inclination to swap forks over yet but I really don’t think it is all down to the fork. Once you have got your head dialled in to the way a 29er rides, and have worked out when you need to start steering, it becomes almost as natural as with a 26 inch wheel bike. Riding one of my favourite single track circuits which combines fast, flowing sections with slow, tight, technical bends is a great test. The Swift piles in to the tight stuff and delivers you out the other side carrying most of your speed intact. To achieve this, you really need to commit to the bend, trust your tyres and stay focused but keep faith and the The Force will carry you through. On the Niner you can approach the same bend with the same amount of gusto, only to find the steering is much, much slower. To get round the tight bends early steering and heavy braking is required, throw in lots of lean and a dollop of muscle, then you will force it through the turn. Once out the other side, it is like a collie puppy, eager to get up and going so you can get back up to speed pretty fast. The trouble is, getting back up to speed requires more energy than simply carrying it through, this in turn will generate a bit more fatigue and you may end up being slower by the end of an extended session. Of the two bikes, the Swift has to win on handling.

Finish, another important factor when buying a frame you intend to keep. I am sorry to say that the paint on the Niner looks a bit thin and it is soft – witness a chunk coming off when I dropped a 4mm allen key on it (much the same as the Reba forks) and several pin hole chips where small stones have been thrown up and onto the frame. The Swift paintwork is thick and tough, I have had a few potential (heavy duty) scratching scenarios and it seems to have shrugged off the offending objects with no ill effects. A year on, and there is hardly a mark on the Swift. Another win for Singular then.

Eccentric Bottom Brackets. The Swift has a Phil Wood EBB which looks like a huge chunk of shiny steel. Secured by two allen bolts, it is easy to adjust but I have had issues with creaking. I may have cured it now but it was very annoying (EDIT: I tracked the creak down and isolated it to slightly loose pedal bearings). The Niner has a proprietary EBB which looks much more expensive, lighter and pretty much what you would expect on a frame twice the price of the Swift. No creaking thus far, so a marginal win for the Niner.

Welds…magazines sometimes go mad about welds and the finishes thereof. Now I am no engineer but I know when I see some rubbish welding, ask the guys at Massi who bodged a repair on one of my frames a few years back! Having owned a Fuquay, I know what a good weld ought to look like but whether it is good or not is still a mystery to me. Let’s just say, the welding on both frames looks tidy and neat. The only way I am going to find out if either frame is deficient is if I manage to break it.

A bug bear for me is the seat clamp. A functional but entirely necessary piece of metal. For the record, I hate seat clamps with weedy little bolts. The Niner comes without a clamp but the Swift has a nice, sturdy one with a 6mm bolt. A massive thumbs up for this, from someone who needs clamps to do up tight and has a track record of over tightening weedy little bolts.

Cable routing works well on both bikes and I really have no comments, positive or negative, about either.

The big win for the Niner is the gear hanger. A neat aluminium hanger that can be swapped over allowing you to run geared or a single speed option (just a vertical dropout sans hanger) is a fantastic touch and I love it. The Swift has a standard hanger which is fine but not quite so flashy! Purists will point out that the EBB will allow you to run single speed on the Swift just as easily as the Niner with its little gizmo. Agreed, but it is such a nice touch, I have to give this one to Niner.

On balance, I have been nit picking. Despite the Niner being new (and therefore fantastic in every regard) the Singular edges this one. It was a very close run thing, it is not deficient in any area and surpasses the Niner in one or two important aspects. Alone, they would not be sufficient to win, the other qualities of the Niner are that good but, at half the price the Swift comes out on top every time.

I will continue to ride and enjoy both bikes but I get the feeling that they will both satisfy different requirements – the Niner will be for longer, epic type rides or maybe endurance races whereas the Swift will be the tool for short blasts of up to 30 miles.

The first ride kicked off with a comedy of errors. I left home and found the saddle was the wrong height (only to be expected) so I changed it. While adjusting the height I spotted that the rear light was missing so I returned home to get it. I set off again only to find the saddle was still wrong, I moved it again and then managed to over tighten the seat clamp bolt and stripped the thread so I dashed back home to scavenge the clamp from the Swift. Changeover complete, saddle the correct height and I was off only to find I had left my bag of essentials (tube, trail tool etc) in the shed. You know the drill, back home…yadda yadda yadda. Anyway, setting off to meet Rich once more I met him within half a mile of my house. Luckily, we had planned to ride a route starting at the back of my house so off we went.

The 29er ride was no surprise to me, I have come to expect the easy rolling characteristic and the bike was soon up to speed. Regular readers will know that my Swift is set up as a fairly basic machine, rigid forks, no frills, a workmanlike bike. I was curious to see how the Sir9 would differ. The major difference between the bikes are the forks, the Reba RLTs took a lot of the buzz out of the trail, the spongier grips further reduced unwanted trail feedback but, notwithstanding these issues, there was something else, something extra that gave the ride a completely different characteristic. It was not until well into the session that I worked out what it was…the wheels. The Swift is running on Superstar Superleggera hubs which are fine, but the DT240s are so much better, and imparted a completely different feel to the machine. Combined with the fork, the impression was one of riding a well sorted, short travel, XC susser. Larger lumps and bumps were eaten up and disposed of with aplomb, roots were laughed at and stutter bumps just disappeared. Combine this with the reduced weight and stiff rear end of a hard tail and you can tell this is going to be fun!

The first climb was up a stony, loose ‘road’ complete with water breaks and ruts. Rich gave up trying to stay with me about a third of the way up and I continued to spin, ever upwards, in a mini cloud of euphoria. As I spend so much time on 29ers just spinning along, I am fresher at the top of climbs than I have any right to be and this time was no exception. A brief wait for Rich and we were off for the first trip into singletrack through a wooded section winding between closely set trees, with slow and fast corners. I was a bit wary here as the bars are wide, really wide and I was apprehensive at the thought of clipping a tree and flying off. I needn’t have worried, the bike flew through the trail. It was manoeuvrable, it accelerated like a rocket and it just urged me on at every stage. The trail flew by in a bit of a blur and towards the end, as it opened out into a wide, hardpacked path I decided to open the throttle. Big gear selected, I stamped on the pedals and was rewarded with an instant burst of speed, then some more as I got into the rhythm. All too soon the gate loomed up ahead and I had to scrub off the speed.

The next section is a lot of road so, forks locked out I sat on the front and tapped out a steady tempo until we hit one of the longer climbs. This time I let Richard sit on the front and I sucked his rear wheel. It was almost too easy and I had to moderate my pedalling to keep behind him. He is not a slow climber, my new found abilities are directly linked to the bike. I sprinted for the prime at the top and left him for dead. The next climb I rode at my own pace and the bike’s abilities shone through once more as I breezed up with little or no effort.

Fire road is bread and butter to this bike and I could not resist the temptation to put the hammer down. The bike is so well behaved that unseen holes wide enough to eat a wheel just disappear and you just seem to float through it all.

We were getting towards the end and Rich got the jump on me at the last prime, I tried my hardest and began to catch up but it was all too late; I had not had the ride all my own way! The ride was 31 miles at an average of 14.8.

Thus far then, this bike seems far more refined than the Swift but I put that down to better wheels and the squish up front. It is fast, handles well and climbs like a mountain goat. Descending is equally good and I can’t fault the ride at all….yet. The next test is extended singletrack…probably later this weekend. Meanwhile, I need to get hold of a decent seatclamp!

Happy as a classroom full of children on the last day of term, I rushed home from Revel Outdoors with my new bike. I have only had the briefest of brief spins on it but so far it feels pretty good – it still has that ‘new bike’ thing going on! It could be the most uncomfortable machine on the planet but right now it is the dog’s nads!

Total weight in stocking feet i.e. no pedals 25lbs 3oz. Not too bad for a chuffing big bike with big wheels etc.

The hubs are pretty old and were running a bit rough when I gave them to Mike. Several sets of new bearings, some grease and a lot of tlc and they are like new. Whereas hubs like those from Hope are loud and brash as you free wheel, these are very refined… like comparing a Rolls Royce or Bentley to a souped up Citroen Saxo.

Likewise, the forks are very smooth (as I would expect) but have yet to be bedded in. Apart from being very green, the whole package seems to go together very well but…and there is a but, the paint work is so soft and fragile, I reckon it will not be long before it needs a respray. For such an expensive frame, I would have expected rather more robust paint: the Swift is half the price and the paint is as tough as old boots and for a mountain bike, that is as it should be.

Barely able to contain my excitement, I managed to restrain myself as a parcel arrived at lunchtime:

There was no mistaking the frame sized box, nor the fact that it very clearly had ‘Niner” printed on the side and it was the package I have been waiting for.

I have taken delivery of enough frames over the years that I should be more relaxed about the whole thing but somehow it never works out that way. This time however, I decided to take my time, not do an impression of a kid on Christmas day ripping packaging off willy nilly but taking time to savour the moment.

And so began the process of revelation:
Lots of packaging, this baby was never going to get trashed by a lazy warehouse man. The tubes were individually covered, the stays supported (as normal) but there were also some serious chunks of cardboard construction that I was able to stand on and not crush!

A few minutes in and the frame was revealed, in all its’ greenness.

Believe it, it is very green, so green it almost jumps out of the box at you. Kermit Green reminds me of the Kamikaze Green of the old Santa Cruz bikes from many years ago. A little anxious after I ordered it, it has already grown on me.

Features include the EBB which is badged up as a Niner own brand. I have no reason to think it is anyone else’s so here it is.

The drop outs are quite interesting too with options to run it as a single speed or geared.

A bolt on gear hanger is included in a little zip lock bag along with a few hose clips. I was intrigued to also discover a little bottle of snot green liquid too and it took a minute or so to realise that it was actually a bottle of paint. Nice touch guys… how often have you had to compromise on paint colour when you have scratched your frame?

Finally, as if I needed any reminding an exhortation by the frame makers, in case I forgot what I was doing….

I will spend some time building this up over the weekend but I doubt it will get finished. Can’t wait to get it out on the trails though.